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Through a Face Scanner Darkly

Anonymity forms a protective casing. When it’s punctured, on the street or at a party, the moment of recognition falls somewhere on a spectrum of delight and horror. Soon enough, though, technology will see to it that we can no longer expect to disappear into a landscape of passing faces.

NameTag, an app built for Google Glass by a company called FacialNetwork.com, offers a face scanner for encounters with strangers. You see somebody on the sidewalk and, slipping on your high-tech spectacles, select the app. Snap a photo of a passerby, then wait a minute as the image is sent up to the company’s database and a match is hunted down. The results load in front of your left eye, a selection of personal details that might include someone’s name, occupation, Facebook and/or Twitter profile, and, conveniently, whether there’s a corresponding entry in the national sex-offender registry.

According to the app’s creator, Kevin Alan Tussy, to build the database, the company is “targeting those with the largest online profiles first, like celebrities, business people, and public figures. But we eventually plan on having everyone with a public social-media profile included in NameTag.” At the moment, the app’s expanding network includes about two million entries, and three hundred testers have already started using it. When the app is officially released to a general audience, sometime before the end of March, you will have to opt out of the database if you don’t want to be listed.

NameTag may appeal first to people who use dating sites: Tussy said the company plans to partner with all of them, like Plenty of Fish, Match.com and OkCupid. When scouting a potential mate, you can look deep into his eyes through your Google Glass and, as is every romantic’s dream, see whether or not he’s a sex offender. Tussy told the press, “It’s much easier to meet interesting new people when we can simply look at someone, see their Facebook, review their LinkedIn page, or maybe even see their dating-site profile. Often, we are interacting with people blindly or not interacting at all. NameTag on Google Glass can change all that.” It can, assuming that the technology works the way it’s supposed to—a tall order, especially at a crowded party, where most people aren’t found in scan-ready postures or well-lit areas.

The more immediate concern, though, is whether the app will be widely accessible. About a year ago, when Google made Glass and its built-in camera available to early adopters and developers, it was apparent that an irksome possibility presented itself: the omniscience of cyber eyes. A few companies leapt at the opportunity to capitalize on facial-recognition software: in addition to Nametag, twenty-four year-old Stephen Balaban’s San Francisco-based startup Lambda Labs has an app called FaceRec in the works. Orbeus, a computer-vision company, created a facial-recognition service, called Rekognition, which promises to identify faces, detect emotion, and determine whether or not the subject is attractive. But it is all black-market software, as far as Google is concerned. Last May, the company posted a statement after hearing feedback from the first Glass-wearers: “We’ve been listening closely to you, and many have expressed both interest and concern around the possibilities of facial recognition in Glass. As Google has said for several years, we won’t add facial recognition features to our products without having strong privacy protections in place. With that in mind, we won’t be approving any facial recognition Glassware at this time.”

The same is true today. A Google spokesperson told me that facial-recognition software will be banned for the foreseeable future, explaining, “It’s in the very early days, and we are thinking very carefully about how we design Glass, because new technology always raises new issues.”

Developers are holding out hope that they’ll be allowed into the app marketplace eventually—whether Apple’s, Google’s, or that of some other device. At the moment, NameTag’s Glass testers are using a workaround to manually load the program. This will serve on a limited basis, but it won’t suffice for wider distribution. “Making real-time facial recognition work on Glass hasn’t been easy, but we did it,” Tussy said when NameTag was announced. “Now the question isn’t if we will support Glass; it’s will Google support us?”

It’s ultimately a question of taste. For years, developers have had the ability to make illicit apps—for gambling and pornography—that wouldn’t be sold in an app store. Facial recognition isn’t criminal, but it carries one’s online presence out into the physical world in a manner that assumes a single, coherent identity. What appears is a virtual twin, one with whom we don’t wish to be seen in person. The entrepreneurs creating this software are betting that, as we’ve seen before, what was once viewed as an invasion of privacy will come to be seen as friendly and insightful. At least for those who can afford a Google Glass.

Photograph by Giuseppe Cacace/AFP/Getty.

Betsy Morais, formerly a member of The New Yorker’s editorial staff, is an editor at Harper’s Magazine.